Eczema is one of the most common skin conditions treated by doctors as well as being one of the most troublesome, and certainly one of the ‘currencies’ of general practice with many patients coming to my surgery every week and presenting with eczema as their main problem. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s be honest. Most of us make at least one New Year’s resolution, and then – usually fairly quickly – break it. It was the Babylonians who invented the New Year’s resolution, with a common one being to return something borrowed from a friend over the past year. Following them, the Chinese used the New Year to cleanse the self of past sins and bad habits and start again with a clean slate. Read the rest of this entry »

If there’s one hot topic that patients seem to be talking about more than most at the moment it is probiotics. These are certainly popular, with 60% of UK households regularly buying probiotic drinks but what are they? Should you be taking them? Do they actually work? These are probably questions worth an answer with the global probiotic market estimated to be a staggering £20 billion.

To try to unravel answers to these questions, it is important to know what both pre- and pro-biotics are, since these are often confused and sometimes incorrectly used synonymously. Read the rest of this entry »

It may come as a surprise to learn that we will eat 10 million turkeys this Christmas, with the average weight of each bird weighing in at 12 pounds. Perhaps less surprising is the fact that – according to the British Dietetic Society – as a nation we eat up to 6,000 calories each on Christmas day with the dinner itself having 1,000 calories in it. (In case you’re wondering, it would take 10 hours of running to burn off those 6,000 calories!)

What most people certainly don’t realise however amidst the annual calorie blow-out is that there are around 30 deaths a year from food poisoning, and that one in five of us will risk food poisoning by eating old turkey leftovers that have been around longer than the recommended limit of 2 days in the fridge. So, what can you do to prevent your risk of being hit by this over the festive season?

Alcohol rarely seems to be out of the headlines at the moment – especially in connection with A and E departments – and the fact that some 3 million people in the UK are dependent on alcohol will come as a surprise to many, but even this figure does not take into account the human cost of this most vicious of addictions. The bill to the NHS is some £3 billion pounds a year, and nearly half of all victims of domestic violence say their attackers assault them while under the influence of booze and the statistics simply go on and on. One million children are living with parents who are alcohol dependent, 65% of all suicides are drink-related, 40% of violent crimes are carried out by people under the influence of alcohol, 80% of businesses believe alcohol is affecting their workers performance, and one in six people killed on the roads is a victim of drink-driving.